this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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This is a weird one. If I buy a book, rare or not, do I not own it?
Think of it like the difference between pulling your car's registration info and tracking your car across thousands of Flock cameras. At some point, scale is qualitatively different.
If you buy a house, it is illegal to set it on fire. It is also illegal to pump infinite molten lead into the soil under your house. It is also illegal to spray aerosolized asbestos out of the chimney of your house 24/7.
You still own the house.
If I buy a book, it is not illegal to destroy it. Your analogy doesn't work. You are talking about acts that could affect the health and well being of others.
Buying food in order to destroy it is bad.
Buying art in order to destroy it, also bad.
Ownership itself is a pragmatic social construct: you “own” things insofar as that “makes sense.”
Does it make sense for Amazon to own rare books? Not really. I’m not sure why that would be allowed. It’s like a child owning a rocket. It simply makes no sense in most contexts.
Are you suggesting we have food and art police? Would a government body decide what I am allowed or not allowed to do with my wagyu steak? Having freedoms sometimes mean we have to accept the actions of others we disagree with.
Did I make any policy suggestions? These are simply moral facts. Laws are a matter of convenience, and if it’s inconvenient for us to legally constrain some evil behaviors, oh well.
What do you think is the appropriate action to this? When you start to establish laws based on evil behaviour, you eventually get witch trials.
What?? Every law we have is a matter of moral debate. Why do you think murder is illegal, or rape? Because these are evil behaviors.
Not every law is a moral debate. Laws limiting the height of my fence is not a moral debate.
Remember the guy who bought an 'art' banana for $6m and then ate it? That also wasn't a moral debate.
If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.
Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.
This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.
You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is analogous to figuring out which natural habitats should be legally protected from construction, etc.
You should start a non profit to buy and protect old and rare books.